Classical homeopathy in the treatment of cancer patients - A prospective observational study of two independent cohorts Full Text
BMC Cancer, 01/20/2011
Clinical Article
Rostock M et al. – In this prospective study, the authors observed an improvement of quality of life as well as a tendency of fatigue symptoms to decrease in cancer patients under complementary homeopathic treatment. It would take considerably larger samples to find matched pairs suitable for comparison in order to establish a definite causal relation between these effects and homeopathic treatment.
Methods- Prospective observational study with cancer patients in 2 differently treated cohorts: 1 cohort with patients under complementary homeopathic treatment (HG; n=259), and 1 cohort with conventionally treated cancer patients (CG; n=380)
- For direct comparison, matched pairs with patients of same tumour entity and comparable prognosis were to be formed
- Main outcome parameter: change of QOL (FACT-G, FACIT-Sp) after 3 months
- Secondary outcome parameters: change of QOL (FACT-G, FACIT-Sp) after a year, as well as impairment by fatigue (MFI) and by anxiety and depression (HADS)
- HG: FACT-G, or FACIT-Sp, respectively improved statistically significantly in the first three months, from 75.6 (SD 14.6) to 81.1 (SD 16.9), or from 32.1 (SD 8.2) to 34.9 (SD 8.32)
- After 12 months, a further increase to 84.1 (SD 15.5) or 35.2 (SD 8.6) was found
- Fatigue (MFI) decreased; anxiety and depression (HADS) did not change. CG: FACT-G remained constant in the first three months: 75.3 (SD 17.3) at t0, and 76.6 (SD 16.6) at t1. After 12 months, there was a slight increase to 78.9 (SD 18.1). FACIT-Sp scores improved significantly from t0 (31.0 - SD 8.9) to t1 (32.1 - SD 8.9) and declined again after a year (31.6 - SD 9.4)
- For fatigue, anxiety, and depression, no relevant changes found
- 120 patients of HG and 206 patients of CG met our criteria for matched-pairs selection
- Due to large differences between 2 patient populations, however, only 11 matched pairs could be formed
- Not sufficient for a comparative study
